Mayor's column: Road improvements to include shoulders for bicycle traffic

By Bill Krawietz, Guest Columnist

Published 1:17 pm, Wednesday, May 1, 2013

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Mayor's column: Road improvements to include shoulders for bicycle traffic

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With the completion of last year's road project we have completed some form or another of chip-seal surfacing, slurry sealing and hot-mix overlay for all 72 miles of roads within our city limits.

Now that we have finished the task of preserving the roads, we can start considering improvements to them.

Most of our roads are quite dated. The roads in our larger neighborhoods such as Oak Village North, Bulverde Hills and Bulverde Estates where built in the late 1960s to early '70s. Bulverde Road and others date back much further.

These roads where not built to very high standards. Very little or no crushed base was used in their construction. Instead, fill was scrapped from the hillsides with looser material and rolled into place. The road surface on top of this comprised of nothing more than a couple layers of tar covered by crushed rock.

Despite their simple construction, they have actually held up surprisingly well. But as we grow the infrastructure will definitely need to be upgraded to accommodate the increased traffic. We are limited to how fast this can happen though with our low tax rate.

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At our April 9 council meeting, we approved the scope of work presented by our public works director. The entire asphalt section of Cougar Bend will be reworked because it is starting to fail in many areas to simply repair it.

With this rework, a 2-foot-wide shoulder will be added to the east side and a 5-foot-shoulder will be added to the west. These will be for pedestrian and bike traffic. We will also include in the bid document a request for pricing options for shoulder repair for some other streets.

We plan to extend the improved shoulders along Cougar Bend through downtown Bulverde and along Bulverde Lane to the park. This will give a safe route for pedestrian and bike traffic to and from Bulverde Hills, Bulverde Estates and Bulverde Oaks as well as from the Bulverde Spring Branch Activity Center.

The ground surveying was completed last year for the section of Bulverde Road from U.S. Hwy. 281 to Bulverde Lane. The digital terrain model information from that project is being used by our engineer to design construction drawings to widen this narrow stretch of highly traveled roadway.

The planned improvements will include nice wide paved shoulders which can be safely used by pedestrian and bike traffic. The project is expected to be completed within the next five years.

This is the section of roadway I wrote about in last week's column about a cyclist who got angry at me for passing him on April 15.

The contractor for our city park has obtained the necessary bond and surety and last week I signed the contract for the $1.6 million project.

The park will include all sorts of amenities including a playground, baseball field and soccer fields, pavilions, restrooms, water-splash pad and a large amount of 5-foot-wide paved hike-and-bike trails.

I am looking forward to using these improvements because they will connect between my house, City Hall and my work. I too enjoy bicycle riding and have ridden to or from work to City Hall on numerous occasions. But I only do so during off-peak traffic hours for safety reasons.

My column last week received a lot of attention from the cycling community and frustrated motorists. Looking back at it, the manner in which I tried to explain a serious safety concern was not my best work. The headline written by the editor of the Bulverde News only drew more attention to article.

The city of Bulverde is working hard to improve our roadways which are full of blind corners and hills with little or no shoulder. We have been fortunate that we don't have more accidents than we have.